These are the caverned troops, by FateForedoomed the guardians of our State.England’s good genius here detainsThese armed defenders of our plains,Doomed to remain till that fell dayWhen foemen marshalled in arrayAnd feuds internecine, shall combineTo seal the ruin of our line!Thrice lost shall England be, thrice won,’Twixt dawn of day and setting sun.Then we, the wondrous caverned band,These mailèd martyrs for the land,Shall rush resistless on the foe.
These are the caverned troops, by FateForedoomed the guardians of our State.England’s good genius here detainsThese armed defenders of our plains,Doomed to remain till that fell dayWhen foemen marshalled in arrayAnd feuds internecine, shall combineTo seal the ruin of our line!Thrice lost shall England be, thrice won,’Twixt dawn of day and setting sun.Then we, the wondrous caverned band,These mailèd martyrs for the land,Shall rush resistless on the foe.
THE “LION AND SWAN,” CONGLETON.
From the crystal cave where these wonders were seen, the farmer was conducted to a cave of gold, filled with every imaginable kind of wealth, and there, in the shape of “as much treasure as he could carry,” he received better payment for his horse than he would ever have obtained at Macclesfield, or any other, fair. We may imagine him (although the legend says nothing on that head) at this point asking the Wizard how many more milk-white steeds he could do with, at the same price; but at this juncture he was conducted back to the entrance, and the gates were slammed to behind him. Strange to say, the “treasure,” according to the story, seems to have been genuine treasure, and did not, next morning, resolve itself into the usual currency of dried sticks and yellow leaves in which wizards and questionable old-time characters of that nature usually settled their accounts.
There are caves and crannies to this day in the wonderful hill, but the real genuine magic cave has never been re-discovered.
That odd early eighteenth-century character, “Drunken Barnaby,” is mentioned elsewhere in these pages. One of his boozy journeys took him out of Lancashire into Cheshire, by way of Warrington and Great Budworth:
Thence to the Cock at Budworth, where IDrank strong ale as brown as berry:Till at last with deep healths felled,To my bed I was compelled:I for state was bravely sorted,By two porters well supported.
Thence to the Cock at Budworth, where IDrank strong ale as brown as berry:Till at last with deep healths felled,To my bed I was compelled:I for state was bravely sorted,By two porters well supported.
The traveller will still find the “Cock” at Budworth, and will notice, with some amusement, that the landlord’s name is Drinkwater. The house is looking much the same as in Barnaby’s day, and has a painting, hanging in the bar, picturing a very drunken Barnaby indeed being carried up to bed. A sundial, bearing the date, 1851, and the inscription, “Sol motu gallus cantu moneat,” has been added, together with a well-executed picture-sign of a gamecock: both placed by the late squire of Arley, Rowland Eyles Egerton Warburton, who seems to have occupied most of his leisure in writing verses for sign-posts and house-inscriptions all over this part of Cheshire. The gamecock himself, it will be noted, has an oddly Gladstonian glance.
From Budworth, by dint of much searching and diligent inquiry, the pilgrim on the borders of Cheshire and Lancashire at length discovers the hamlet of Thelwall, a place situated in an odd byway between Warrington, Lymm, and Manchester, in that curious half-picturesque and half-grimly commercial district traversed by the Bridgewater and the Manchester Ship Canals.
Thelwall, according to authorities in things incredibly ancient, was once a city, but the most diligent antiquary grubbing in its stony lanes and crooked roads, will fail to discover any evidences in brick or stone of that vanished importance, and is fain to rest his faith upon county historians and on the lengthy inscription in iron lettering in modern times fixed upon the woodenbeams of the old “Pickering Arms” inn that stands in midst of the decayed “city.” By this he learns that, “In the year 920, King Edward the Elder founded a cyty here and called it Thelwall.” And that is all there is to tell. It might have been a Manchester or a Salford, had the situation been well chosen; but as it is, it teaches the lesson that though a king may “found” a city, not all the kingship, or Right Divine of crowned heads, will make it prosper, if it be not placed to advantage.
THE “COCK,” GREAT BUDWORTH.
Chester itself is, of course, exceptionally rich in old inns, but Chester has so long been a show-place of antiquities and has so mauled its reverend relics with so-called “restorations” that much oftheir interest is gone. The bloom has been brushed off the peach.
One of the oldest inns of Chester is the little house at the corner of Shipgate Street and Lower Bridge Street, known as the “King Edgar”; the monarch who gives his name to the sign being that Anglo-Saxon “Edgar the Peaceable” who reduced the England of his day to an unwonted condition of law and order, and therefore fully deserves the measure of fame thus given him.
We are told by Roger of Wendover and other ancient chroniclers how, in the year 962, King Edgar, coming to Chester in the course of one of his annual progresses through the country he ruled, was rowed in a state barge upon the river Dee by eight tributary kings; and one is a little puzzled to know whence all these kings could have come, until the old monkish accounts are fully read, when it appears that they were only kings in a comparatively small way of business. According to Roger of Wendover, they were Rinoth, King of Scots, Malcolm, King of the Cumbrians, Maco, King of Mona and numerous islands, and five others: Dusnal of Demetia, Siferth and Huwal of Wales, James, King of Galwallia, and Jukil, King of Westmoreland.
The sign of the inn, a very old and faded and much-varnished painting, displays that historic incident, and, gazing earnestly at it, you may dimly discern the shadowy forms of eight oarsmen, robed in red and white, and with golden crowns on their heads, rowing an ornate but clumsy craft,while King Edgar stands in the stern sheets. Another figure in the bow supports a banner with the sign of the Cross. The whole thing looks not a little like a giant black-beetle crawling over a kitchen-table.
THE “PICKERING ARMS,” THELWALL.
Until quite recently the “King Edgar” inn was the most picturesquely tumble-down building in Chester, a perfect marvel of dilapidation that no artist could exaggerate, or any one, for that matter, care to house in. But it has now not only been made habitable, but so “restored” that only the outlines of the building, and that faded old sign, remain recognisably the “King Edgar.” It is now rather a smart little inn, displayingnotices of “Accomodation for Cyclists”—spelled with one “m”—and thus, so renovated and youthful-looking, as incongruously indecent as one’s grandmother would be, were she to let her hair down and take to short frocks again.
Separated from it by only one house, and that as commonplace a building as possible, suppressed so far as may be in the accompanying illustration, by the adventitious aid of “artistic licence,” is the “Bear and Billet” inn, at this time, although repaired, in the most satisfactorily conservative condition of any old inn at Chester. Its front is a mass of beautifully enriched woodwork, under one huge, all-comprising gable. The “Bear and Billet” was not always an inn. It has, in fact, declined from private mansion to public, having originally been the town mansion of the Earls of Shrewsbury, and remaining their property until 1867. Adjoining is the Bridge Gate of the city, associated with the “Bear and Billet” by reason of the fact that the Talbots, Earls of Shrewsbury, were hereditary Sergeants of the Gate. Long after they had ceased to occupy the house as a residence, they continued to reserve a suite of rooms in it, for use on those state occasions when they resorted to Chester to act their hereditary part.
THE “KING EDGAR” AND “BEAR AND BILLET,” CHESTER.
The “Falcon” inn, until recent years an unspoiled house whose nodding gables and every time-worn timber were eloquent of the sixteenth century, and the delight of artists—who, however eager they were to sketch it, were not so ready to stay there—has been so extravagantly renovated, in the worst sense of that word, when dealing with things ancient and venerable, that although, during that work of renovation, much earlier stonework and some additional old timbering were revealed and have been preserved, their genuine character might well be questioned by a stranger, so lavish with the scraping and the varnish were those who set about the work. In short, the “Falcon” nowadays wears every aspect of a genuine Victorian imitation of an Elizabethan house, and, while made habitable from the tourist’s point of view, is, artistically, ruined.
In the same street we have the “Old King’s Head” “restored” in like manner, but so long since that it is acquiring again, by sheer lapse of time and a little artistic remissness in the matter of cleaning, a hoary look. Near by, too, is a fine house, now styling itself “Wine and Spirit Stores,” dated 1635.
In Watergate Street is the “Carnarvon Castle,” with one of the famed Chester “rows” running in front of the first floor; while, opposite, the “Custom House” inn, dated 1636 and in its unrestored original state, recalls the far-distant time when Chester was a port. Indeed, at the extremity of this street still stands the old “Yacht” inn, where Dean Swift was accustomed to stay when he chose the Chester and Parkgate route to Ireland.
A catalogue of all the, in some way, odd inns of Chester would of necessity be lengthy; butmention may here be made of the exquisitely restored little “Boot” inn, dated 1643, in Eastgate Street, with a provision-shop below and a “row” running above, and of the red-brick “Pied Bull” and the adjoining stone-pillared “Old Bell”—“licensed 1494”—at the extreme end of Northgate Street.
INNS RETIRED FROM BUSINESS
That striking feature of the last few years, the voluntary or the compulsory extinction of licences, with its attendant compensation, has created not a little stir among people with short memories, or no knowledge of their country, who cherish the notion, “once an inn, always an inn,” and forget the wholesale ruin that befell inns all over the land upon the introduction of railways, causing hundreds of hostelries to close their doors. The traveller with an eye for such things may still identify these inns retired from business, chiefly by their old archways and entries into stable-yards, but to the expert, even when those features are absent, there is generally some indefinable air about a house once an inn that singles it out from others. Such an one is the immense, four-square, red-brick farm-house midway between Lichfield and Burton-on-Trent, once a coaching- and posting-house famous in all that countryside as the “Flitch of Bacon”; such was the exclusive “Verulam Arms” at St. Albans, where mere plebeian coach-passengers wore not suffered, and only the high and mighty who could afford post-chaises were condescended to. The “VerulamArms” had, however, the briefest of careers. Built in 1827, railways ruined it in ten years, and, shorn of its vast stables, on whose site a church has been built, it has ever since been in private occupation. In short, along the whole course of the Holyhead Road the inns retired from business are an especial feature, the village of Little Brickhill being little else than a place of old hostelries and taverns of every class, whose licences have long ago been surrendered, for lack of custom. Thus you may travel through to Anglesey and be continually passing these evidences of the ruin caused by railways, once so distressing to many interests, and a pitiful commentary upon the activity of inventors; but long ago fallen back into that historical perspective in which ruin and wrong become the sign-posts of “progress.” The chief inns that are inns no longer on this north-western road through England are numerous; the minor taverns and ale-houses that have closed their doors innumerable. Among others, we have—speaking merely at a venture—the aristocratic “Bull’s Head,” Meriden, the “Haygate” inn, near Wellington, the “Talbot,” Atcham, “Talbot,” Shrewsbury, and “Prince Llewelyn,” Cernioge—all establishments of the first order; and if we turn to the Great North Road, a very similar state of things is found. On that great highway the famous “Haycock” inn at Wansford bravely kept its doors open until recent years, but could endure no longer and is now a hunting-box belonging to Lord Chesham. The “New Inn” at Allerton isnow a farm-house; the celebrated “Blue Bell” on Barnby Moor became a country seat, and the very moor itself is enclosed and cultivated. The “Swan” and “Angel,” both once great and prosperous coaching-houses at the busy town of Ferrybridge, have ceased their hospitality, and the “Swan” itself, once rather oddly kept by a Dr. Alderson, who combined the profession of a medical man with the business of innkeeping, has been empty for many years past, and stands mournfully, falling into ruin, amid its gardens by the rive Aire.
Quite recently, after surviving for over sixty years the coming of the railway and the disappearance of the coaches from the Brighton Road, the old “Talbot” at Cuckfield has relinquished the vain struggle for existence, and old frequenters who come to it will find the house empty, and the hospitable invitation over the doorway, “You’re welcome, what’s your will?” become, by force of circumstances, a mockery.
There is a peculiar eloquence in the Out-of-Date, the Has Been. Institutions and ancient orders of things that have had their day need not to have been intrinsically romantic in that day to be now regarded with interest. Whether it be a road much-travelled in the days before railways, and now traced only by the farm-labourer between his cottage and his daily toil, or by the sentimental pilgrim; or whether it be the wayside inn or posting-house retired from public life and now either empty or else converted into a farm-house,there is a feeling of romance attaching to them really kin to the sentiment we cherish for the ruined abbeys and castles of the Middle Ages.
Scouring England on a bicycle to complete the collection of old inns for this book, I came, on the way from Gloucester to Bath, upon such a superseded road, studded with houses that had once been coaching hostelries and posting-houses and are now farmsteads; and others that, although they still carry on their licensed trade, do so in strangely altered and meagre fashion, in dim corners of half-deserted and all-too-roomy buildings. It is thirty-four miles of mostly difficult and lonely road between those two cities: a road of incredible hills and, when you have come past Stroud and Nailsworth, of almost equally incredible solitudes. You climb painfully up the north-westerly abutments of the Cotswolds, to the roof of the world at a place well named Edge, and there in a bird’s-eye view you see Painswick down below, and thenceforward go swashing away steeply, some three miles, down into the crowded cloth-weaving town of Stroud, where most things are prosperous and commonplace, and only the “Royal George Hotel” attracts attention, less for its own sake than by reason of the lion and unicorn over its portico: the lion very golden and very fierce, apparently in the act of coming down to make a meal of some temerarious guest; the unicorn more than usually milk-white and mild-mannered.
A DESERTED INN: THE “SWAN,” AT FERRYBRIDGE.
Beyond Nailsworth begin the hills again, and the loneliness intensifies after passing the admirably-named Tiltups End. “How well the name figures the gradient!” thinks the cyclist who comes this way and pauses, after walking two miles up hill, to regain his breath. He has here come to the very ideal of what we learned at school to be an “elevated plateau, or table-land”; and a plaguy ill-favoured, inhospitable place it is, too, yet not without a certain grim, hard-featured interest in its starveling acres, its stone-walled, hedgeless fields, and distant spinneys. It is interesting, if only serving to show that to our grandfathers, who perforce fared this way before railways, their faring was not all jam. Nor is it so to the modern tourist who—experto crede—faces a buffeting head-wind in an inclement April, and encounters along these weary miles a succession of snow-blizzards and hail-showers: all in the pursuit of knowledge at first-hand. The way avoids all towns and villages, and all wayfarers who can shift to do so avoid this way; and you who must trace it have but occasional cottages, often empty and ruinous, or a lonely prehistoric sepulchral barrow or so for company—and they are not hilarious companions. Your only society is that rarely failing friend and comforter—your map, and here even the map is lacking in solace, for when it ceases to trace a merely empty road, it does so chiefly to chronicle such depressing names as “Starveall,” an uncomplimentary sidelight on the poor land where neither farmers can live nor beasts graze; or others as mysterious as“Petty France,” a hamlet with two large houses that once were inns. “Cold Ashton,” too, is a name that excellently figures the circumstances of the route. Even modern portents have a ghastliness all their own, as when, noticing two gigantic, smoke-and-steam-spouting ventilators, you realise that you are passing over the long Sodbury tunnel of the new “South Wales Direct” branch of the Great Western Railway.
Beyond this, in a wooded hollow at the cross-roads respectively to Chipping Sodbury and Chippenham, you come past the wholly deserted “Plough” inn to the half-deserted, rambling old coaching-and posting-inn of “Cross Hands,” where a mysterious sign, unexplainable by the innkeeper, hangs out, exhibiting two hands crossed, with squabby spatulate fingers, and the inscription “Caius Marius Imperator B.C. 102 Concordia Militum.” What it all means apparently passes the wit of man, or at any rate of local man, to discover.
Passing the solitudes of Dodington and Dirham parks, with the forbidding, heavy, mausoleum-like stone lodges the old squires loved to erect as outposts to their demesnes, and encountering a toll-house or so, the road at last, three miles from Bath, dips suddenly down. You see, from this eyrie, the smoke of Bath, the roofs of it and the pinnacles of its Abbey Church, as it were in the bottom of a cup, and, ceasing your labour of pedalling, you spill over the rim, into the very streets, feeling like a pilgrimnot merely from Gloucester, but from all the world.
Notable among the inns retired from business is the little “Raven” at Hook, on the Exeter Road, before you come to Basingstoke. It ceased in 1903 to be an inn, and the building has since been restored and converted into a private residence styled the “Old Raven House.” Built in 1653, of sound oak framing, filled with brick-nogging in herring-bone pattern, it has been suffered to retain all its old-world features of construction, and thus remains an interesting specimen of seventeenth-century builders’ work.
THE OLD “RAVEN,” HOOK.
But it is on quite another count that the “Raven” demands notice here. It was thewayside inn at which the infamous “Jack the Painter,” the incendiary of Portsmouth Dockyard, stayed on the way to accomplish his evil purpose.
James Hill, a Scotsman, and a painter by trade, went under the assumed names of Hind and John Aitkin. Visiting America, he there acquired a maniacal hatred for England, and returned with the design of setting fire to all our great dockyards, and thus crippling our resources against the foreign foe. On December 7th, 1776, he caused a fire at Portsmouth Dockyard that wrought damage to the extent of £60,000. Arrested at Odiham on February 7th, 1777, he was very speedily brought to trial at Winchester, and executed on March 10th, being afterwards gibbeted, a good deal higher than Haman, at Blockhouse Beach, from the mizzen-mast of theArethusa, especially set up there for the purpose, 64½ feet high. One of the choicest and most thrilful exhibits at the Naval Exhibition of 1891 at Chelsea was a tobacco-stopper made out of a mummified finger of this infernal rascal.
The derelict inns of the Exeter Road are not so numerous, but a striking example is found at West Allington, outside Bridport, where the old “Hearts of Oak” stands forlorn, a small portion of it in private occupation and a long range of stables and wayside smithy gradually becoming ruinous and overgrown with ivy. The old lamp remains over the door of the inn, and in it, typical of this picture of ruin, the sparrow has built her nest.
The most singular instance of an inn retired from business must surely be that of the “Bell” at Dale, near Derby, but more singular still is the circumstance of its ever having become a public-house, for the building was once actually the guest-house of Dale Abbey. Since it ceased to be a village ale-house, some seventy-six years ago, it has become a farm.
THE “HEARTS OF OAK,” NEAR BRIDPORT.
The illustration shows the extraordinary features of the place: on the right-hand the farmhouse portion, which seems, by the evidence of some carving on the gable, to have been partly rebuilt in 1651, and on the left the parish church, surmounted by an eccentric belfry, greatly resembling a dovecote. The interior of this extraordinary and exceedingly diminutive church—one of the smallest in England—is aclose-packed mass of timbering and old-fashioned, high, box-like Georgian pews. A little churchyard surrounds church and farmhouse, and in the background are the tree-covered hills that completely enclose this well-named village of “Dale,” an agricultural outpost of Derbyshire, on the very edge of the coal-mining and ironworks districts of Nottinghamshire.
Should the ancient hermit, whose picturesquely situated, but damp, cave on the hillside used to be shown to visitors, be ever suffered in spirit to return to his rheumaticky cell, I think he would find the scenery of Dale much the same as of old, but from his eyrie he would perceive a strange thing: a gigantic cone-shaped mountain in the near neighbourhood, with spouts and tongues of fire flickering at its crest: a thing that fully realises the idea of a volcano. This is the immense slag-heap of the ironworks at Stanton-by-Dale, impressive even to the modern beholder.
Of Dale Abbey itself, few fragments are left: only the tall gable containing the east window standing up gaunt and empty in a meadow, and sundry stone walls of cottages and outhouses, revealing that once proud house.
The “Falcon” at Bidford, near Stratford-on-Avon, associated with Shakespeare, is now a private house, and the once busy rural “Windmill” inn at North Cheriton, on the cross-country coach-road between Blandford and Wincanton, retired from business forty years ago. It is remarkable for having attached to it a tennis-court, originallydesigned for the entertainment of customers in general and of coach-passengers in particular. Waiting there for the branch-coach, travellers whiled away the weary hours in playing the old English game of tennis.
THE “BELL” INN, DALE ABBEY.
Perhaps the finest of the inns that are inns no more was the famous “Castle” inn at Marlborough. It was certainly the finest hostelry on the Bath Road, as the inquisitive in such things may yet see by exploring the older building of Marlborough College. For that was the aristocratic “Castle” until 1841, when the Great Western Railway was opened to Bath and Bristol, and so knocked the bottom out of all the coaching and thelicensed-victualling business between London and those places.
THE “WINDMILL,” NORTH CHERITON.
I have termed the “Castle” ‘aristocratic,’ and not without due reason. The site was originally occupied by the great castle of Marlborough, whose origin itself goes back to the remotenesses and vaguenesses of early British times, before history began to be. The great prehistoric mound that (now covered with trees) still darkens the very windows of the modern college buildings was first selected by the savage British as the site of a fortress, and is in fact the “bergh” that figures as “borough” in the second half of the place-name. From the earliest times the Mound was regarded with awe and reverence, and was thecentre of the wild legends that made Marlborough “Merleberg” or “Merlin’s town”: home of the great magician of Arthurian legend. Those legends had never any foundation in fact, and even the otherwise credulous antiquaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dismiss them as ridiculous, but the crest surmounting the town arms still represents the Mound, and a Latin motto dedicatory to “the bones of the wise Merlin” accompanies it.
The mediæval castle of Marlborough that arose at the foot of this early stronghold gave place to a splendid mansion built by Francis, Lord Seymour, in time for the reception of Charles the Second, who halted here on one of his progresses to the West. This was partly rebuilt and greatly enlarged in the time of William the Third, and then assumed very much the appearance still worn by the main building of the present College. In or about 1740 the great mansion became the residence of Lady Hertford, under whose rule the grounds were planted with formal groves of limes and set about with yews trimmed into fantastic shapes, and further adorned with terrace-walks and grottoes, intended to be romantic. She converted the spot into a modish Arcadia, after the ideals of her time; and fashionables posed and postured there in the guise of Watteau nymphs or old Chelsea china-ware shepherds and shepherdesses, and imagined they were being rural and living the Simple Life when, in fact, they were being most artificial. The real Wiltshire peasantry,the true flesh-and-blood shepherds and shepherdesses of the surrounding wind-swept downs, who lived hardly upon rye bread and dressed in russet and homespun woollens, looked with astonishment, as well they might, upon such folk, and were not unnaturally amazed when they saw fine ladies with short skirts, silken stockings and high-heeled shoes, carrying dainty shepherds’ crooks tied with cherry-coloured ribbons, leading pet lambs combed and curled and scented, and decorated with satin rosettes. Those Little Bo-Peeps and their cavaliers, dressed out in equally fine feathers, were visions quite outside their notions of sheep-tending.
Here my lady entertained great literary folk, among them Thomson ofThe Seasons, and here, in one of the sacred Arcadian grottoes, he and my lord were found drunk, and Thomson thereafter lost favour; was, in fact, thrust forth in haste and with contumely. This, my brethren, it is to love punch too well!
Something of my lady’s artificial pleasance still survives, although greatly changed, in the lawns and the trees, now grown very reverend, upon which the south front of the old mansion looks; but in some eleven years after her time, when the property came to the Dukes of Northumberland, the building was leased to a Mr. Cotterell, an innkeeper, who in 1751 opened what had until then been “Seymour House” as a first-class hostelry, under the style and title of the “Castle” inn. In that year Lady Vere tells howshe lay “at the Castle Inn, opened a fortnight since,” and describing it as a “prodigious large house,” grows indignant at the Duke of Northumberland putting it to such debased uses, and selling many good old pictures to the landlord.
Cotterell apparently left the “Castle” almost as soon as he had entered, for we find another landlord, in the following year, advertising as follows inThe Salisbury Journalof August 17th, 1752:
I beg leave to inform the public that I have fitted up the Castle at Marlborough in the most genteel and commodious manner and opened it as an inn where the nobility and gentry may depend on the best accommodation and treatment, the favour of whose company will always be gratefully acknowledged by their most obedient servant George Smith, late of the Artillery Ground. Neat postchaises.
I beg leave to inform the public that I have fitted up the Castle at Marlborough in the most genteel and commodious manner and opened it as an inn where the nobility and gentry may depend on the best accommodation and treatment, the favour of whose company will always be gratefully acknowledged by their most obedient servant George Smith, late of the Artillery Ground. Neat postchaises.
THE “CASTLE” INN, MARLBOROUGH.
“The quality” loved to linger here on their way to or from “the Bath,” for the inn, with its pictures, much of its old furniture, and its splendid cuisine, was more like a private house than a house of public entertainment. Every one who was any one, and could afford the luxury of the gout and the inevitable subsequent cure of “the Bath,” stayed at the “Castle” on the way to or from their cure: and there was scarce an eighteenth-century name of note whose owner did not inscribe it in the Visitors’ Book of this establishment. Horace Walpole, curiously examining the winding walks the Arcadian Lady Hertford had caused to be made spirally up the sides of the poor old Mound;Chesterfield, meditating polite ways of going to the devil; in short, every great name of that great, but very material, time. Greater than all others was the elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and of his greatness and importance he was not only himself adequately aware, but was determined at all costs that others, too, should be fully informed of it. It was in 1762, travelling to London, that he came this way, suffering torments from the gout that all the waters of Bath had failed to cure, and roaring with apprehension whenever a fly buzzed too near his inflamed toes. He was either in no haste to reach home, or else his gout was too severe to prevent him being moved, for he remained for many weeks at the “Castle.” That prolonged stay seems, however, to have been premeditated, for he made it a condition of his staying that the entire staff of the inn should be clothed in his livery, and that he should have the whole place at his own disposal. That was exclusiveness, if you like, and the modern traveller who secures a first-class compartment wholly to himself cuts a very poor, ineffectual figure beside the intolerance of company shown by the great statesman. The proprietor of the “Castle” must have required a large sum, thus to close his house to other custom for so long a time, and to possibly offend more regular patrons. In fact, the fortunes of the “Castle” as an inn ebbed and flowed alarmingly even before the coaching age and coaching inns were threatened with extinction by railways. Earlyin the ’20’s, the innkeeper was Thomas Cooper, who found the undertaking of maintaining it too much for him, and so removed to Thatcham, where he became proprietor of the “Cooper Company” coaches. Cooper, however, was not a fortunate man, and coaching eventually landed him in the Bankruptcy Court. He lived his last years as the first station-master at the Richmond station of the London and South-Western Railway.
In 1842, when the road, as an institution, was at an end, the “Castle” was without a tenant, for no one was mad enough to entertain the thought of taking a new lease of it as an inn, and the house was much too large to be easily let for private occupation. At that time a site, and if possible a suitable building also, were being sought by a number of influential persons for the purpose of founding a cheap school for the sons of the clergy: and here was discovered the very place to fit their ideal. The neighbourhood was rural and select, and was so far removed from any disturbing influence that the nearest railway-station was a dozen miles away, at Swindon: the site was extensive and the building large, handsome, and convenient. Here, accordingly, what is now Marlborough College was opened, with two hundred boys, in August, 1843.
Many changes have taken place since then. The original red-brick mansion, designed by Inigo Jones or by his son-in-law, Webb, stands yet, but is neighboured by many new blocks of scholasticbuildings, and the enormously large courtyard which in the old days looked upon the Bath Road, and was a place of evolution for post-chaises and coaches, is planted with an avenue, down whose leafy alley you see the striking pillared entrance of what was successively mansion and inn. Inside they show you what was once the bar, a darkling little cubicle of a place, now used as a masters’ lavatory, and a noble oak staircase of astonishingly substantial proportions, together with a number of fine rooms.
GARDEN FRONT, “CASTLE” INN, MARLBOROUGH.
It was at the “excellent inn at Chapel House,” on the read to Worcester and Lichfield, that Dr. Johnson, in 1776, was led by the comfort of his surroundings to hold forth to Boswell upon “the felicity of England in its taverns and inns”; triumphing over the French for not having in any perfection the tavern life.
The occasion was one well calculated to arouse enthusiasm for the well-known comforts of the old-time English hostelry. He had come, with the faithful Boswell, by post-chaise from Oxford, on the way to Birmingham; it was the inclement season of spring, the way was long, and the wind, blowing across the bleak Oxfordshire downs, was cold. Welcome, then, the blazing fire of the “Shakespeare’s Head”—for that was the real name of the house—and doubly welcome that dinner for which they had halted. Can we wonder that the worthy Doctor was eloquent? I think not. “There is no private house,” said he, “in which people can enjoy themselves so well as in a capital tavern.... No man but a very impudent dog indeed can as freely command what is in another man’s house as if it were his own; whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome; and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you with the alacrity which waiters do, who are incited by the prospect of an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, sir, there is nothing which has yetbeen contrived by man, by which so much happiness is provided as by a good tavern or inn.”
The “Chapel House” inn took its name from a wayside chapel formerly standing here, anciently belonging to the neighbouring Priory of Cold Norton. At a later period, when education began to spread and the roads were travelled by scholars and others on their way to and from Oxford, Brasenose College took over the conduct of it, both as an oratory and a guest-house for the succour of wayfarers along these then unenclosed and absolutely lonely downs. A priest was maintained here until 1547. Afterwards the site seems to have been occupied by a mansion built by William Fitzalan, of Over Norton: a house that gave place in its turn to the inn.
Few ever knew “Chapel House” inn by its real name. It doubtless obtained the title from surviving traditions of Shakespeare having partaken of the hospitality of the old guest-house, on his journeys between Stratford-on-Avon and London. It is, indeed, singular how such traditions survive in this neighbourhood, the “Crown” at Oxford being traditionally the successor of the house where Shakespeare usually inned, and an old Elizabethan mansion at Grendon Underwood, formerly an inn, a halting-place when he chose another route and went by that village and Aylesbury to London.
But guests at “Chapel House” no more knew the inn as the “Shakespeare’s Head” than travellers on the Exeter Road would have recognised“Winterslow Hut” by its proper title of the “Pheasant.” And now the great coaching- and posting-inn has gone the way of all those other inns and taverns where Doctor Johnson—that greatest of Samuels since the patriarch—genuinely dined and supped and drank. Sad it is to think that all the festive shrines frequented by him to whom a tavern chair was “the throne of human felicity” have disappeared, and that only inns that were contemporary with him, andwouldhave Johnsonian associations had he ever entered them, survive to trade on that slender thread of might-have-been.
As usual with the fine old roadside hostelries of this class, the coming of the railway spelled ruin for it. The great house shrank, as it were, into itself; its fires of life burnt low, the outer rooms became empty of furniture, of carpets, of everything save memories. The stable-yards grew silent; grass sprouted between the cobbles, spiders wreathed the windows in webs; the very rats, with tears in their eyes for the vanished days of plenteous corn and offal, were reduced to eating one another, and the last representative died of starvation, with “sorrow’s crown of sorrow”—which we know to be the remembrance of happier days—embittering his last moments.
Why did not some student of social changes record intimately the last lingering days of the “Chapel House” inn: why did no artist make a pictorial record of it for us? It decayed, just as, centuries earlier, the “Chapel” had done from which its name derived, stone by stone and brick by brick, and there was none to record, in literature or in art, the going of it. All we know is that it ceased in 1850 to be an inn, that the remains of the house long stood untenanted; that the dependent buildings became labourers’ cottages, and that the stables have utterly vanished.
“CHAPEL HOUSE” INN.
What is “Chapel House” to-day? You come along the lonely road, across the ridge of the downs, from Oxford, and find, just short of the cross-roads to Stratford-on-Avon and Birmingham, to Banbury or Cirencester, past where a milestone says “Oxford 18, Stratford-on-Avon 21, and Birmingham 43 miles,” a group of some ten stone-built cottages, five on either side of the road, with the remains of the inn itself on the right, partly screened from observation by modern shrubberies. A porticoed doorway is pointed out as the former entrance to the tap, and the present orchard in the rear is shown as the site of the greater part of the inn, once extending over that ground in an L-shape. The house is now in use as a kind of country boarding-house, where “paying-guests,” who come for the quiet and the keen, bracing air of these heights, are received.
For the quietude of the place! How cynical a reverse of fortune, that the busiest spot on the London, Oxford and Birmingham Road, where sixty coaches rolled by daily, and where innumerable post-chaises changed horses, should sink thus into slumber! The thought of such a change would, seventy years ago, have beeninconceivable; just as unthinkable as that Clapham Junction of to-day should ever become a rural spot for picnics and the plucking of primroses.
A curious feature in the story of “Chapel House” inn is that a small portion of the house has in recent times been rebuilt, for the better accommodation of present visitors. In the course of putting in the foundations some relics of the old chapel were unearthed, in the shape of stone coffins, bones, a silver crucifix, and some beads.
When evening draws in and the last pallid light in the sky glints on the old casements of the wayside cottages of “Chapel House,” or in the dark avenue, the spot wears a solemn air, and seems to exhale Romance.
London inns retired from business are, as may be supposed, comparatively few. A curious example is to be found under the shadow of St. Alban, Holborn, in “White Hart” Yard, between Gray’s Inn Road and Brooke Street. It is the last fragment of an old galleried building, presumably once the “White Hart,” but now partly occupied by a dairyman and a maker of packing-cases. Local history is silent as to the story of the place.
Of all converted inns, there is probably no stranger case than that of the “Edinburgh Castle.” It is not old, nor was it really and truly, in the hearty, hospitable sense, an inn, although the landlord doubtless was included in the all-comprising and often deceptive category of “licensedvictuallers,” who very generally do not victual you. The “Edinburgh Castle” was, in short, a great flaring London gin-palace in Limehouse. It has been described by a journalist addicted above his fellows to superlatives—the equivalent in literature of nips of brandy “neat”—as “one of the flashiest, most flaunting, sin-soaked dens in London,” which is just so much nonsense. Itwas, however, a public-house on a large scale, and did a big trade. It was ornate, in the vulgar, gilded public-house way, and not what can properly be styled a “den.”
“WHITE HART” YARD.
Those curious in conversions may easily see to-day what the “Edinburgh Castle” was like, for its outward look is unchanged, and many anold frequenter, come back from foreign climes—or perhaps only from H.M. Prison on Dartmoor—shoulders his way in at the old familiar doors and calls for his “four ’arf,” or his “two o’ brandy,” before he becomes aware of the essential change that has come over the place. No more booze does he get at the “Edinburgh Castle”: only coffee, tea, or the like—which do not come under that head. The “Edinburgh Castle” has indeed been acquired by the Barnardo Homes for the “People’s Mission Church.”
There are excuses for the mistake often made by old patrons, for the idea of the management is to entice them in, in the hope of reforming them. But if those old customers were at all observant they would at once perceive, and make due deductions from, the odd change in the sign that still, as of yore, is upheld on its old-fashioned post by the kerbstone. Instead of proclaiming that So-and-So’s Fine Ales are sold at the “Edinburgh Castle,” it now reads: “No drunkards shall inherit the kingdom of God.”
The sham mediævalism of this castellated house is a mean affair of grey plaster, but the interior of the great building is surprisingly well appointed. Mission services alternate with concerts and entertainments for the people and drill-exercises for the Barnardo boys. The ex-public-house is, in fact, whatever it may look like from without, a centre whence a measure of sweetness and light is dispensed in an intellectually starved purlieu.
INNS WITH RELICS AND CURIOSITIES
Just as most cathedrals, and many ancient churches, are in these days unconsciously looked upon by antiquaries rather as museums than as places of worship, so many ancient inns attract the tourist and the artist less as places for rest and refreshment than subjects for the pencil, the brush, or the camera; or as houses where relics, curious or beautiful, remain, of bygone people, or other times. Happy the traveller, with a warm corner in his heart for such things, who comes at the close of day to a house historic or well stored with such links that connect us with the past.
There are, indeed, even in these days, when many a house has been ransacked of its interesting features, to furnish museums and private collections, still a goodly number of inns containing curious relics, old panelling, and ancient furniture. Still, for example, at the “Green Dragon,” Combe St. Nicholas, two miles from Chard, the fifteenth-century carved oak settle of pronounced ecclesiastical character remains in the tap-room, and beery rustics continue to this day to use it, even as did their remote ancestors, the Colin Clouts of overfour hundred years ago; while at Ipswich, in the “Neptune” inn that was once a private mansion before it entered public life, the fine Tudor dresser, or sideboard, with elaborately carved Renaissance canopy and “linen-fold” panelling, is yet left, despite the persuasions and the long purses of would-be purchasers.
There are two evil fates constantly threatening the artistic work of our forbears: the one the unappreciative neglect that threatens its very existence, and the other the appreciation that, only too appreciative, tears it from its accustomed place, to be the apple of some collector’s jealous eye. To filch from old inn or manor-house, down on its luck, the carved overmantels or panelling built into the place is as mean and despicable a thing as to sneak the coppers out of a blind beggar’s tin mug—nay, almost as sacrilegious as to purloin the contents of the offertory-bag; but it is not commonly so regarded. For example, the “Tankard” tavern at Ipswich, once the town mansion of no less a person than Sir Anthony Wingfield, Captain of the Guard to Henry the Eighth, possessed a grandly panelled room with a highly elaborate chimney-piece representing the Judgment of Paris; but in 1843 the whole was taken down and re-erected at the country house of the Cobbolds.
Still, fortunately, at the “Trevelyan Arms,” Barnstaple, the fine old plaster fireplace remains, together with a good example at the “Three Tuns,” Bideford; while doubtless numerous otherinstances will be borne in mind by readers of these pages.
A “FENNY POPPER.”
We deal, however, more largely here with relics of a more easily removable kind, such, for example, as those odd pieces of miniature ordnance, the “Fenny Poppers,” formerly kept at the “Bull,” Fenny Stratford, but now withdrawn within the last year from active service, to be found reclining, in company with the churchyard grass-mower and a gas-meter, in a cupboard within the tower of the church. The “Fenny Poppers,” six in number, closely resemble in size and shape so many old-fashioned jugs or tankards. They are of cast-iron, about ten inches in length, and furnished with handles, and were presented to the town of Fenny Stratford in 1726 by Browne Willis, a once-noted antiquary, who rebuilt the church and dedicated it to St. Martin, in memory of his father, who was born in St. Martin’s Lane and died on St. Martin’s Day. These “cannon” were to be fired annually on that day, and to be followed by morning service in the church and evening festivities at the “Bull”—a custom still duly honoured, with the difference that this ancient park of artillery has recently been replaced by two small cannon, kept at the vicarage.
THE “BELL,” WOODBRIDGE.
How far one of the old-fashioned hay and straw weighing-machines, once common in East Anglia, but now growing scarce, may be reckoned a curiosity must be left to individual taste and fancy; but there can be no difference of opinion as to the picturesque nature of these antique contrivances. The example illustrated here gives an additionally pictorial quality to the “Bell” inn and to the view down the long street at Woodbridge. Cartloads of hay and straw, drivenunder these machines, were lifted bodily by means of the chains attached to them, and weighed by means of the lever with the sliding weight, seen projecting over the road. The innate artistry of the old craftsmen in wrought-iron is noticeable even here, in this business-like contrivance; for you see clearly how the man who wrought the projecting arm was not content to fashion itmerely to a commonplace end, but must needs, to satisfy his own æsthetic feeling, finish it off with little quirks and twirls that still, coming boldly as they do against the sky-line, gladden the heart of the illustrator.
THE “RED LION,” MARTLESHAM.
There was, until recent years, a similar machine attached to the “King’s Head” inn, at the entrance to Great Yarmouth, and there still exists one at King’s Lynn and another at Soham.
A rustic East Anglian inn that is alike beautiful in itself and in its tree-enshrouded setting, is the “Red Lion,” Martlesham. It possesses the additional claim to notice of its red lion sign being no less interesting a relic than the figurehead of one of the Hollanders’ ships that took part in the battle of Sole Bay, fought between Dutch and English, March 28th, 1672, off Southwold. He is a lion of a semi-heraldic type supporting a shield, and maintained carefully in a vermilion post-office hue.
That well-known commercial hotel at Burton-on-Trent, styled nowadays the “Queen’s Hotel,” but formerly the “Three Queens,” from an earlier house on the site having been visited at different times by Queen Elizabeth, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Queen Adelaide, still displays in its hall the cloak worn by the Queen of Scots’ coachman, probably during the time of her captivity at Tutbury Castle, near by. Why he should have left it behind is not stated; but as the garment—an Inverness cape of very thin material—is figured all over with the particularly vivid and variegatedStuart tartan—all scarlet, blue, and green—the conjecture may be hazarded that he was ashamed any longer to wear such a strikingly conspicuous article of attire in a country where it probably attracted the undesirable attentions of rude boys and other people who, most likely, took him for some mountebank, and wanted to know when the performance began.
“DEAN SWIFT’S CHAIR,” TOWCESTER.
The Holyhead Road, rich in memories of Dean Swift travelling to and from Ireland, has, in the “Talbot” inn at Towcester, a house associated with him. The “Talbot,” the property of the Sponne Charity since 1440, was sold about1895 to a firm of brewers, and a chair, traditionally said to have been used by the Dean, was at the same time removed to the Town Hall, where, in the offices of the solicitor to the feoffees of the Charity, it remains. It will be observed that the chair was of a considerable age, even in Swift’s time. An ancient fragment of coloured glass, displaying the arms of William Sponne, remains in one of the windows of the “Talbot,” and on a pane of another may be seen scratched the words “Gilbert Gurney,” presumably the handiwork of Theodore Hook.
The “Bear,” at Esher, properly the “Black Bear,” is an old coaching- and posting-house. Still you see, on the parapet, the effigies of two bears, squatting on their rumps and stroking their stomachs in a manner strongly suggestive of repletion or indigestion. Sometimes the pilgrim of the roads finds them painted white, and on other occasions—in defiance of natural history—they have become pink; all according to the taste and fancy of the landlord for the time being. Whoever, that was not suffering from delirium tremens, saw such a thing as a pink bear?
Among other, and less interesting, relics in the entrance-hall of this house, the visitor’s attention is at once struck by a glass case containing a huge and clumsy pair of jack-boots closely resembling the type of foot-gear worn by Marlborough and his troopers in the long ago, at Blenheim, Ramillies, and Malplaquet. They are not, however, of so great an age as that, norassociated with warlike campaigns, for they were worn by the post-boy who, in 1848, drove Louis Philippe, the fugitive King of the French, to his refuge at neighbouring Claremont.
BOOTS AT THE “BEAR,” ESHER.
Certainly unique is the “George and Dragon” inn at Dragon’s Green, between Shipley and Horsham, in Sussex. Dragon’s Green (which doubtless derives its name from the inn-sign) is among the tiniest of hamlets, and few are those wayfarers who find their way to it, unless indeed they have any particular business there. In fact, so out of the world is it that those who inquire for Dragon’s Green, even at Horsham, are like to ask many people before they happen upon any one who has ever heard of the place. But who should have any business, save curiosity, at Dragon’s Green, it is somewhat difficult to conceive. Since 1893, however, it has been the bourne of those curiosity-mongers who have by chance heard of the tombstone erected by the roadside there, in the front garden of the inn. To the stranger who has never heard of this oddity, and comes unexpectedly upon it, the sight of a solemn white marble cross in a place so generally associated with convivialityis nothing less than startling. The epitaph upon it reads: